The latest indie download for the Xbox One has some of the best Unreal Engine 4 visuals so far, and some very unusual puzzles…

It is upsetting to have to give a game as ambitious and daring as this a mediocre score. It takes a truly awful experience for us not to feel at least a little guilty about criticising any game, but when it’s an indie title trying to craft an innovative new take on Myst style puzzlers it feels even worse. But despite Pneuma’s obviously noble intentions it’s flaws are just as hard to miss.

In Pneuma you play the part of a god. Not an angry Kratos type or a hands-off Peter Molyneux sort but a decidedly non-omniscient being who’s new on the job and only now learning about the universe he may or may not have created. That doesn’t stop him from assuming dominion over it all anyway, despite ample evidence that he’s being watched and manipulated by some other power.

Pneuma describes itself as an ‘ontological puzzler’, meant to challenge your own view of reality and sense of self. We know how pretentious that sounds, but the tragically self-absorbed monologue of your god does add a great element of self-aware comedy. What it doesn’t do though is make up for the fact that the whole set-up is clearly in serious debt to first person puzzle classic Myst, and yet has nowhere near the quality of puzzles to match.

Despite being a god you’re a curiously incapable video game character, and while we weren’t necessarily expecting to be be throwing any thunderbolts around the majority of the game time is spent… looking at things. This is a more interactive activity than it might sound, as simply looking, or not looking, at a symbol or device is often enough to activate or change it.

The theme here is that your experience is shaping reality, which is a fine philosophical idea for a game to pursue. But in practical terms staring at eyeball symbols to open doors is not a terribly exciting basis for a video game.

There are more complicated puzzles of course, such as matching the colour of floor tiles or when the speed at which you’re travelling becoming important, but the majority are still all based around what is or isn’t within the first person camera’s field-of-view. There’s the odd bit of simple platforming and some button-pressing conundrums, but they’re only fleeting attempts to add variety – and not terribly convincing ones at that.

Not only do most of the solutions revolve around where and how you look at the world but they’re often a lot more fiddly to complete then they should be – with the solution often becoming obvious long before you’re able to actually get the camera pointed where it needs to be to complete it.

Beyond the one trick pony nature of the puzzles the game is also very short, which only replaces one frustration with another. The greatest annoyance though is how much more interesting everything but the puzzles are. The visuals, using Unreal Engine 4, are fantastic and it’s easy to see why the gameplay was constructed around the idea of simply examining your environment.

The Graeco-Roman architecture and incredible lighting almost make the game worth playing simply as a semi-interactive graphics demo. But the story of a nascent god discovering creation is also interesting and, again, far more compelling than the actual gameplay. He starts off in a preposterous state of overconfidence, which slowly seeps away as he has to work harder and harder to solve each puzzle.

His amusing naivety about the game world allows the writers to address all manner of philosophical questions about how we ordinary mortals perceive the world and how that perception may or may not alter it. The fact that this is all conveyed via some witty (if occasionally too on-the-nose) Douglas Adams-esque dialogue creates its own philosophical quandary: if the only bad part of a game is the gameplay itself, is it still worth playing?

The answer to that is dependent on the rather more pragmatic concern of money, and whether you want to spend £16 on a short, beautiful, funny, but also rather repetitive first person puzzler. If only the game was a bit cheaper we’d be more confident in recommending it despite its flaws. But the irony for a game that’s obsessed by vision and the seen and unseen, is that you’re probably just better off watching rather than playing it.

In Short: Portraying existential quandaries as gameplay puzzles is a daring idea, but ultimately this is a more enjoyable game to watch and listen to than it is to play.

Pros: The visuals are gorgeous and despite odd moments of clumsiness the script is often funny, clever, and genuinely thought provoking.

Cons: The gameplay concept underpinning the majority of puzzles just isn’t that interesting, and often frustrating to work with. Very short and too expensive.